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Sunday, February 13, 2011

Devils defenseman Mark Fraser apparently still has a ways to go to earn the trust of head coach Jacques Lemaire.

Lemaire did not like Fraser’s play on Patrick Marleau on the San Jose Sharks’ only goal Friday night.

“I didn’t like the goal,” Lemaire said.

Fraser got knocked off balance as he was battling for position with Marleau in front. Marleau got to the rebound of Niclas Wallin’s point shot and put it past Johan Hedberg to give the Sharks a 1-0 lead. Fraser played the remainder of his shift after the goal, but was not credited in the official ice time statistics with any other shifts in the game.

“Clear the puck, clear the man. Anything except puck in the net,” Lemaire said. “What I don’t like is when you’re involved and the puck goes in the net. Once that’s fine, twice maybe that’s acceptable. Except when it repeats, you’ve got to work there. Come in practice, work there, you’ll get better, you’ll play more. That’s how it works.”

I asked Fraser if there was anything he could have done differently on that play.

“I was really just trying to box him out,” Fraser said. “I was trying to push him out of the way so Heddy could see the shot. I think it was just unfortunate that the rebound sat right there for him and it was behind me. If I was engaged with him a little bit more, I might have seen the puck quicker, but that’s a really tough play. You want your goalie to make the first save and he did. If the (rebound) was six inches the other way, then I would have gotten it. It was a really tough bounce, I guess.”

Fraser said he received no negative feedback from the coaching staff after the goal, though.

“I stayed out for the rest of that shift and when I got back Larry Robinson actually thought it might have bounced off of me,” he said. “There was a few other times where they tried to throw me out there, but there were power plays and line matches. But that didn’t end my night, which was good because goals happen. It was nice to know that no one was pointing a finger.”

(I didn’t have the heart to tell Fraser that Lemaire kind of did point his finger).

Lemaire said that Fraser only did not play “at the end” and pointed out that other players also did not play at the end.

He doesn’t seem to like being asked about players’ ice time (as with Mattias Tedenby) and went on a little rant on the subject when I asked him about Fraser not playing at the end of Friday’s game.

“You guys can talk about this, but (for) myself, it’s just normal," Lemaire said. "It’s how you’re going to play and that will give you the ice time you deserve to play. How you play you get the amount of ice time, OK? If you get 26 minutes, that is because you’ve got to be doing something good. When you get 20 as a forward, you’ve got to be good. And if you get (four) minutes, whoops, there’s something missing. And it’s like that for every team, not only ours.”

***That today’s optional practice was open to some season ticket holders seemed to take some of the players by surprise. Not that they seemed to mind.

“I think it’s fun,” Hedberg said. “I didn’t know this was going to be (an open practice). I know we had a fan function after practice, but I didn’t know (about the practice). I think they had fun. They got some cheers and it certainly brings an extra element to the practice.”

One of the highlights of the practice was a shootout competition. Anssi Salmela and Adam Mair were the only players to score (both on Hedberg). Mike McKenna did not allow any of the players who shot on him to score, but gave up a goal to assistant coach Adam Oates.

“I would have loved to stop (Oates),” McKenna said. “Coaches are a wild card. At least you’ve seen the players (shoot before).”

Oates was known more as an assist man in his playing days, but did score 341 goals.

***McKenna wore his new mask in today’s practice. From a distance, it doesn’t look that different from his old mask.

It has two large red Devils’ logos on each side. There is a chevron on the chin, which McKenna said is a nod to the “Devils’ Army.”

Woven into each of the Devils’ logos are images of two past Devils’ goaltenders: Chico Resch and Lindsay Middlebrook.

Middlebrook played only nine games for the Devils during their inaugural New Jersey season of 1982-83 and went 0-6-1, but he had a personal connection to McKenna, who grew up in St. Louis – the city where Middlebrook retired to.

“He was the first goalie coach I had as a kid and he also was my coach in Bantam,” McKenna said. “Lindsay was real important to me and everything that’s happened to me.”

Resch told McKenna that Middlebrook’s nickname was “China Wall”, so there artist also painted a small image of the Great Wall on the mask.

McKenna said he put Resch on there because of his longtime association with the Devils as a player and a television analyst. McKenna said that Martin Brodeur, Chris Terreri and Resch are the big three of Devils’ goaltending history.

He said he considered putting an image of Brodeur on his mask, but thought it might be strange because Brodeur is still playing for the team. For similar reasons, he decided against putting Terreri, the Devils’ current goaltending coach, on there.

About

TOM GULITTI has covered the New Jersey Devils for The Record since 2002. Prior to that, he covered the New York Rangers for four years. Gulitti joined The Record in 1998 after six years at The North Jersey Herald News. He graduated from Binghamton University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric-Literature.